To mix metaphors, the definition of insanity is to invariably and repeatedly select the hammer over all other options from a fully-stocked tool chest and expect every objective to behave like a nail.
Overreliance on the military instrument has made the United States strategically lazier and lazier over time. It’s hard to disagree with you that this Iran debacle is an end point (if not necessarily the endpoint) of this longstanding, ever deepening strategic laziness. A kind of last-gasp triumph of laziness. Nicely done.
There's an earlier error that precedes the one you've discussed. That is the desperate need the United States has to force other countries to clearly be in one political camp or the other. We cannot accept the messy complexity of the world and just leave it alone. All the Middle Eastern conflicts you mention follow from the single bad decision to prop up the Shah and claim he stood with us against communism. We drew at most 25 years of limited benefit from this and have now paid 45 years of unanticipated costs. Instead of engaging with countries at an average level through normal trade and investment that ebbs and flows as political conditions change we insist they become our best friend and exclusive security partner, or force them into becoming our enemies.
Great reality check. I ask myself sometimes, what do I know. Trivially, working a crossword puzzle, maybe. At other times regarding something consequential.
We know some stuff, as a country. But the kind of exposition offered here gets lost in a blitzkrieg of lies and disinformation. Steve Bannon saw the potential.
That piece of shit. Republicans have been lying forever. No one wants what they're peddling, and if Republicans are honest they get their asses handed to them.
So it's a torrent of lies and they're rewriting history and appealing to the exceptionalists as never before. We're God's gift. Never done anything wrong. Yeah, right.
This was more or less Napoleon's great strategic failure too, btw. He could win wars, indeed he was famously good at that. (Drawing on a genuinely revolutionary paradigm shift in how wars were waged didn't hurt there.) He could dictate terms. He could redraw maps.
What he was not able to do was parse together political outcomes the rest of Europe was willing to live with, and although it took a generation eventually French military resources were simply exhausted by the constant armed dispute.
This administration is incapable of righting the wrongs. We have lost all credibility on the international arena because our president has only his greed and a the maniacal desperation to be adored as his motivation.
I think, America needs to come to terms with who we are now. How does life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness apply in our basic principles if we've abandoned those principles for U.S. citizens?
Trump is a falsity, he isn't interested in being president, it's just a position to enrich himself and to exercise the levers of power. That is proven every single day by his actions/inaction.
Lumping these four cases together misses a distinction that I think is important. In Iraq and Afghanistan the opposition started with grossly inferior enemy militaries and degenerated into chaotic "survive locally until the Americans give it up" campaigns that worked primarily because the Americans did eventually give it up. Vietnam was something quite different, and the IRGC is presenting more like the Vietnamese than like the others.
The Vietnamese NVA did not see themselves, and in fact were not, an inferior military. They were the military force of a poor country with limited resources. But they were highly professional and implemented coherent, though sometimes mistaken, strategies from the beginning to the end. (Keep in mind that they also won three other wars in the late 20th century.) They made realistic estimates of what the US could accomplish and how they could frustrate US goals. And within the limits of their resources, they consistently surprised us. Their effort did not degenerate into local survival efforts. They stayed in the fight as serious contenders from the beginning to the end. They did not win by wearing us out. They won by demonstrating that we could not defeat them.
I saw this at a personal level. I was an interrogator in 1970 and 1971. That was an experience that shocked my American assumptions. Most relevantly, the enemy (especially NVA) did not perceive themselves as an inferior military. They considered that as soldiers they were about the equal of Americans. The simplest measure to illustrate that is the rules of thumb about what actions to take when you unexpectedly run into enemy forces. When ARVNs outnumber you by less than 2 to 1, go ahead and engage. For Americans, you want one to one. For Thai, any ratio was acceptable. For Australians, Koreans, and Hmong, you need a ratio in your favor. (That last one surprised me. I had just one PW who had served in Laos. He was very highly respectful of the Hmong.)
Above the level of my personal experience, they always produced superb intelligence and analysis of the war. My intelligence unit went into a panic one day when all the units we were tracking near the Cambodian border disappeared. Turns out that Nixon's incursion into Cambodia was about to happen. They knew before our intelligence units were told. The incursion was easy because they had already performed large scale maneuvers to get their troops out of the way. There was a rumor that the high-level plan issued by COSVN had been written in 1960. I can't vouch for that, but the fact that the rumor was believable to us says a lot. In any case COSVN had relocated to inside South Vietnam to be out of the way of the fighting. (A fact that we only found out much later.)
Enough of my ancient history. The point is that the IRGC sounds a lot more the NVA than like the other two. They seem to have spent the last 20 years in careful, realistic analysis of our strengths, their strengths, and the achievable goals of both sides. I am sure that they would rather not have done this, but once involved in actual fighting, they have not come unprepared.
I am puzzled that anyone thinks it significant that their air force and navy are not up to our standard. They always knew that if they go into a war with us the US would have pretty complete control of the skies. Drones have changed that somewhat, but their working assumption was always that their air force and navy would be destroyed. So they never invested large resources in building those. Or in the mobility needed for logistic support in something like a conventional war with a neighbor. But by most accounts they have made their country all but un-invadable.
The Iranians have other kinds of problems. I think that if they fail, it will be because of bad economic (especially water) management or political senility. But they seem to have their act together on the military side.
Actually, as I understand it, the JCPOA was about as close as American strategy ever got on a long-term global-import, strategic issue.
If the Trump administration had any intelligence or negotiation skills (lol), they'd try to build on it. It'll never happen, mostly because Trump would need to admit a mistake and admit he probably lost his war.
The only good solution that I can see coming out of this clusterf*** would be:
* Re-establish something like the JCPOA (Iran nuclear back-off, sanctions relief (with a path to sanctions elimination))
* American reparations (to help rebuilding Iran)
* An acknowledgement from Iran of Israel's right to exist and thrive
* A commitment from both the US & Israel to never do this again as long as the treaty is in force (this is a problem; commitments from Donald Trump are like his wedding vows - and everyone now knows this)
* In the best case, a commitment from Iran to foreswear Hamas, Hezballah and the Houthis and join the community of nations as a peace-loving (non-Death-to-America) nation.
It's a tall order, but notice how high "reparations" is on that list. Other countries may just kick in if something like this is for real.
The likelihood of something like this coming out of negotiations that involve JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (and getting the approval from Donald Trump) is pretty much infinitessimal.
Since the Trump regime doesn’t know what US strategic interests are, of course it cant answer the question if its actions serve those strategic interests….
5 decades of costly foreign military intervention cased the public to vote a failed con artist into power, the same con artist lead to the current stage of force intervention into Iran, the end game would be similar to Vietnam Iraq and Afghanistan, a quiet disengagement, with public opinion completely soured at djt for the breaking of the no war (or so call war) pledge, and that cost of living is now becoming a major issue due to 1/4 crude 1/3 urea 1/4 helium 1/5 LNG 1/6 aluminium being removed from the supply chain. The logical conclusion is the next general election will see the removal of the djt admin and leave the upcoming admin to deal with the massive fall out. The removal of the djt admin could happen sooner if the supply shock which is actually more acute than reported cause hard material shortage that fundamentally impact the global economy and force a global depression, when that happens, voters will seek the easiest way to signal their discontent, and if history is any guide and recent domestic political events transpire, it could lead to serious back clashes against the djt regime. Iran just need to sit and wait out until a reasonable party return to power greatly weakened by the current mess would seek a complete regional disengagement to relieve public finance pressure, leaving Iran the victor in the regional conquest. One could even see the alignment of Iran and Iraq.
To mix metaphors, the definition of insanity is to invariably and repeatedly select the hammer over all other options from a fully-stocked tool chest and expect every objective to behave like a nail.
Overreliance on the military instrument has made the United States strategically lazier and lazier over time. It’s hard to disagree with you that this Iran debacle is an end point (if not necessarily the endpoint) of this longstanding, ever deepening strategic laziness. A kind of last-gasp triumph of laziness. Nicely done.
There's an earlier error that precedes the one you've discussed. That is the desperate need the United States has to force other countries to clearly be in one political camp or the other. We cannot accept the messy complexity of the world and just leave it alone. All the Middle Eastern conflicts you mention follow from the single bad decision to prop up the Shah and claim he stood with us against communism. We drew at most 25 years of limited benefit from this and have now paid 45 years of unanticipated costs. Instead of engaging with countries at an average level through normal trade and investment that ebbs and flows as political conditions change we insist they become our best friend and exclusive security partner, or force them into becoming our enemies.
Clear and surgically insightful. Another terrific essay!
Terrific article.
Great reality check. I ask myself sometimes, what do I know. Trivially, working a crossword puzzle, maybe. At other times regarding something consequential.
We know some stuff, as a country. But the kind of exposition offered here gets lost in a blitzkrieg of lies and disinformation. Steve Bannon saw the potential.
That piece of shit. Republicans have been lying forever. No one wants what they're peddling, and if Republicans are honest they get their asses handed to them.
So it's a torrent of lies and they're rewriting history and appealing to the exceptionalists as never before. We're God's gift. Never done anything wrong. Yeah, right.
This was more or less Napoleon's great strategic failure too, btw. He could win wars, indeed he was famously good at that. (Drawing on a genuinely revolutionary paradigm shift in how wars were waged didn't hurt there.) He could dictate terms. He could redraw maps.
What he was not able to do was parse together political outcomes the rest of Europe was willing to live with, and although it took a generation eventually French military resources were simply exhausted by the constant armed dispute.
'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" ~Isaac Asimov
This administration is incapable of righting the wrongs. We have lost all credibility on the international arena because our president has only his greed and a the maniacal desperation to be adored as his motivation.
I think, America needs to come to terms with who we are now. How does life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness apply in our basic principles if we've abandoned those principles for U.S. citizens?
Trump is a falsity, he isn't interested in being president, it's just a position to enrich himself and to exercise the levers of power. That is proven every single day by his actions/inaction.
Lumping these four cases together misses a distinction that I think is important. In Iraq and Afghanistan the opposition started with grossly inferior enemy militaries and degenerated into chaotic "survive locally until the Americans give it up" campaigns that worked primarily because the Americans did eventually give it up. Vietnam was something quite different, and the IRGC is presenting more like the Vietnamese than like the others.
The Vietnamese NVA did not see themselves, and in fact were not, an inferior military. They were the military force of a poor country with limited resources. But they were highly professional and implemented coherent, though sometimes mistaken, strategies from the beginning to the end. (Keep in mind that they also won three other wars in the late 20th century.) They made realistic estimates of what the US could accomplish and how they could frustrate US goals. And within the limits of their resources, they consistently surprised us. Their effort did not degenerate into local survival efforts. They stayed in the fight as serious contenders from the beginning to the end. They did not win by wearing us out. They won by demonstrating that we could not defeat them.
I saw this at a personal level. I was an interrogator in 1970 and 1971. That was an experience that shocked my American assumptions. Most relevantly, the enemy (especially NVA) did not perceive themselves as an inferior military. They considered that as soldiers they were about the equal of Americans. The simplest measure to illustrate that is the rules of thumb about what actions to take when you unexpectedly run into enemy forces. When ARVNs outnumber you by less than 2 to 1, go ahead and engage. For Americans, you want one to one. For Thai, any ratio was acceptable. For Australians, Koreans, and Hmong, you need a ratio in your favor. (That last one surprised me. I had just one PW who had served in Laos. He was very highly respectful of the Hmong.)
Above the level of my personal experience, they always produced superb intelligence and analysis of the war. My intelligence unit went into a panic one day when all the units we were tracking near the Cambodian border disappeared. Turns out that Nixon's incursion into Cambodia was about to happen. They knew before our intelligence units were told. The incursion was easy because they had already performed large scale maneuvers to get their troops out of the way. There was a rumor that the high-level plan issued by COSVN had been written in 1960. I can't vouch for that, but the fact that the rumor was believable to us says a lot. In any case COSVN had relocated to inside South Vietnam to be out of the way of the fighting. (A fact that we only found out much later.)
Enough of my ancient history. The point is that the IRGC sounds a lot more the NVA than like the other two. They seem to have spent the last 20 years in careful, realistic analysis of our strengths, their strengths, and the achievable goals of both sides. I am sure that they would rather not have done this, but once involved in actual fighting, they have not come unprepared.
I am puzzled that anyone thinks it significant that their air force and navy are not up to our standard. They always knew that if they go into a war with us the US would have pretty complete control of the skies. Drones have changed that somewhat, but their working assumption was always that their air force and navy would be destroyed. So they never invested large resources in building those. Or in the mobility needed for logistic support in something like a conventional war with a neighbor. But by most accounts they have made their country all but un-invadable.
The Iranians have other kinds of problems. I think that if they fail, it will be because of bad economic (especially water) management or political senility. But they seem to have their act together on the military side.
Actually, as I understand it, the JCPOA was about as close as American strategy ever got on a long-term global-import, strategic issue.
If the Trump administration had any intelligence or negotiation skills (lol), they'd try to build on it. It'll never happen, mostly because Trump would need to admit a mistake and admit he probably lost his war.
The only good solution that I can see coming out of this clusterf*** would be:
* Re-establish something like the JCPOA (Iran nuclear back-off, sanctions relief (with a path to sanctions elimination))
* American reparations (to help rebuilding Iran)
* An acknowledgement from Iran of Israel's right to exist and thrive
* A commitment from both the US & Israel to never do this again as long as the treaty is in force (this is a problem; commitments from Donald Trump are like his wedding vows - and everyone now knows this)
* In the best case, a commitment from Iran to foreswear Hamas, Hezballah and the Houthis and join the community of nations as a peace-loving (non-Death-to-America) nation.
It's a tall order, but notice how high "reparations" is on that list. Other countries may just kick in if something like this is for real.
The likelihood of something like this coming out of negotiations that involve JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (and getting the approval from Donald Trump) is pretty much infinitessimal.
If all you got is a hammer...
Thanks for this easily understandable yet truly profound analysis of how 60 years of conceptual confusion got us to this point.
Since the Trump regime doesn’t know what US strategic interests are, of course it cant answer the question if its actions serve those strategic interests….
5 decades of costly foreign military intervention cased the public to vote a failed con artist into power, the same con artist lead to the current stage of force intervention into Iran, the end game would be similar to Vietnam Iraq and Afghanistan, a quiet disengagement, with public opinion completely soured at djt for the breaking of the no war (or so call war) pledge, and that cost of living is now becoming a major issue due to 1/4 crude 1/3 urea 1/4 helium 1/5 LNG 1/6 aluminium being removed from the supply chain. The logical conclusion is the next general election will see the removal of the djt admin and leave the upcoming admin to deal with the massive fall out. The removal of the djt admin could happen sooner if the supply shock which is actually more acute than reported cause hard material shortage that fundamentally impact the global economy and force a global depression, when that happens, voters will seek the easiest way to signal their discontent, and if history is any guide and recent domestic political events transpire, it could lead to serious back clashes against the djt regime. Iran just need to sit and wait out until a reasonable party return to power greatly weakened by the current mess would seek a complete regional disengagement to relieve public finance pressure, leaving Iran the victor in the regional conquest. One could even see the alignment of Iran and Iraq.